Look For This When Acquiring Startups, It Could Triple the Resale

Look For This When Acquiring Startups, It Could Triple the Resale

Author: Acquire.com December 19, 2024 Duration: 12:07

After building and selling one of the first ChatGPT plagiarism checkers on the market in 2024, Tomer Tarsky decided to search Acquire.com for another project in the edtech AI space. He found a promising business, grew it for seven months, and sold it for three times the purchase price.


The business Tomer stumbled across was called Seamless For Science. It was an AI literature review generator with 20,000 free users. While it didn’t make much money, its users were extremely active and would immediately complain if the service went down even for a day.


After acquiring the business (which was built in a development language Tomer didn’t know), all he had to do was adjust the homepage copy and up the prices. Immediately, he earned $2,000 more in MRR despite some churn.


“I knew if just one percent of those free users converted, we would have a lot more money,” he says.


However, Tomer soon reached the limits of improvements he could make without hiring a developer. He’d already decided he wanted to expand outside of edtech, so Tomer returned to Acquire.com and sold it for three times what he bought it for within a few days.


Tune into Tomer’s podcast with Andrew Gazdecki post-acquisition as they discuss:

  • Why Tomer thinks it’s easier to double ARR on a $3k startup than a $30k startup 💹.
  • How Tomer recommends other founders look for good startup buys on Acquire.com 🔍.
    • Why Tomer thinks you should beware of buyers who won’t get on the phone 📲.


  • Tomer is just getting started and you can follow him here:


    Behind every successful startup acquisition, there's a story-a complex mix of strategy, emotion, and paperwork that rarely gets discussed openly. Startup Acquisition Stories, from the team at Acquire.com, pulls back the curtain on those real-world transactions. Each episode features founders and entrepreneurs who have personally navigated the process of selling or buying a business through their platform. You'll hear them recount the nuanced decisions that don't make it into press releases: the challenging conversations around valuation, the subtle art of vetting the opposite party, and the critical, often overlooked, steps after the handshake. This podcast digs into the practicalities of due diligence, structuring terms, and managing the transfer of assets, all the way through to escrow and the crucial post-deal transition. It’s a grounded, detail-oriented look at the mechanics of a business exit or expansion, straight from the people who’ve lived it. For anyone curious about the actual path to a deal, beyond the theory, this series offers a rare archive of lived experience and hard-won advice.
    Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

    Startup Acquisition Stories
    Podcast Episodes
    From a Real Problem to a SaaS Product Buyers Wanted [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

    Duration: 23:20
    Jacob Miller didn’t set out to build a SaaS product. He was running a home services business when a shift in how customers search started to affect lead flow in a real way.Instead of relying on agencies, he built his own…
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    Duration: 14:17
    Charles Kenny built a profitable e-commerce brand after solving a recovery problem he experienced firsthand. The product worked, customers were buying, and the business ran cleanly.Still, as the brand matured, one limit…
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    Jatin Arora spent six years building Utilize and reached a point most founders recognize: the product worked, customers were happy, and growth was steady.But when he and co-founder Sameer Sanagala decided to sell, the fi…
    How One Acquisition Solved a Critical Growth Bottleneck [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

    Duration: 20:50
    Joel Graber built Modern Outbound from zero and watched the same problem show up across every client: design bottlenecks he could not solve. Building a service from scratch meant years of hiring, finding product-market f…
    Bootstrapped, Profitable, and Acquired in Four Days [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

    Duration: 12:28
    Customer support software is one of the most crowded SaaS categories out there. Intercom, Crisp, and dozens of others have been around for years. Building something new in that space and actually finding customers takes…
    How Usage-Based Pricing Led to a Seven-Figure Exit [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

    Duration: 56:30
    Jeremy Redman didn't set out to build a team. TaskMagic began as a no-code browser automation tool built to eliminate repetitive tasks. While it solved a real problem, it also revealed early limits.Rather than stopping t…
    How a Simple Academic Tool Became an Acquired Startup [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

    Duration: 7:02
    Ovi Shekh didn’t set out to build a startup. Wisdomic AI began as a practical response to an academic challenge, where literature review work demanded time, structure, and careful organization.The first version was inten…
    Valuable, But Not Truly Scalable [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

    Duration: 21:30
    Hugo Pereira didn’t build Ritmoo chasing hypergrowth. The product emerged from real operating experience inside scale-ups, where goal management often looked structured but repeatedly failed in execution.Ritmoo was desig…
    How Pre-Revenue Startups Became Repeat Exits [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

    Duration: 15:36
    Faizan Muhhamad didn’t build software to scale teams or chase traction. He built products to work, transfer cleanly, and make sense to the right buyer from day one.By treating software as a transferable asset, Faizan bui…
    Why Local Habits and Simple Tech Created a Perfect Exit [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

    Duration: 26:03
    Renata Raya didn’t chase a complex tech idea. She solved a simple problem: cart abandonment in Latin America.By building GoRecover around WhatsApp instead of email, she achieved a 20% recovery rate and created a stable,…